Four years later, Bubba arrived, clinging to a blue blanket for warmth. Not long after that, Bubba started clinging to a baseball bat. He hasn’t stopped.

“By the time he was 2, half the lamps in the house were broken because he was always swinging that bat,” Buddy Trammell, Bubba’s father, said by phone from his Knoxville, Tenn. home. “We put a batting cage in the backyard when he was 14. He’d be out there swinging a bat eight hours a day. He’d come inside for a sandwich and go right back outside. He wore me out so I got an automatic ball feeder for it and headed back inside to the air conditioning.”

All that practice made for a perfect Mets debut for Trammell.

Not feeling so great about life? Your skies are forever gray, your spirits blue? Convinced there is no exit from the abyss? Stop fretting. A solution is within reach. Just get Steve Phillips to trade for you and all your troubles will be solved.

Mike Bordick and Rick White had their smash-hit openings Saturday and yesterday it was Trammell’s turn to make a Mets debut that will have his loved ones clearing open the front page of the scrapbook of baseball memories.

Buddy Trammell’s boy has had big days before, but he never quite had one like this.

As of Saturday, Trammell never had received a curtain call and never had seen the great Willie Mays in person. He experienced both thrills yesterday on a day Mays and lesser baseball gods were on the field for a pre-game ceremony in celebration of the greatest moments in Mets history.

The chairs were cleared, the players took the field and the man who has answered to the name Bubba all his life had the greatest of his baseball moments.

Trammell ruined Cardinals right-hander Garrett Stephenson’s day with a three-run home run in the second inning of a game the Mets would win, 4-2. As Bordick had the day before, Trammell homered in his first at-bat as a Met.

“This is right at the top,” Trammell said moments after the Mets had completed a three-game sweep of the Cardinals.

White had said the day before, after his and Bordick’s big day, the only thing the Mets needed now was a pinch-hit home run from Trammell. Trammell’s home run, an 0-2 fastball driven into the visitors’ bullpen in left, came as a starter, not a pinch hitter. This made it all the sweeter for this meant he would receive an extra ovation on his way out to right field for the bottom of the second.

“I heard a lot of ‘Welcome to New York’ on my way out to right,” Trammell said.

What he heard in the top of an inning was like nothing he had heard in his 28 years on planet earth. He heard 45,733 voices making such a fuss over him, demanding he pop out of the dugout so they could take another look at their newest hero.

“This was like Opening Day all over again for me,” Trammell said. “It was exciting to feel the electricity in the crowd. It was something I hadn’t been accustomed to.”

The crowd was never more electric than when it forced Trammell out of the dugout for a wave of his helmet.

“A couple of the guys started pushing me,” Trammell said. “After a couple pushes, it didn’t take a whole lot.”

Back home in Knoxville, where Buddy Trammell listened to a radio broadcast on the Internet, nobody had to shove him. His emotions took him off of his seat. His wife was at work, where she sells fragrances, so he listened to the game with his sister, visiting from Texas.

“I thought I was gonna cry when he hit that ball,” Buddy said. “When the announcer said, ‘That’s a long drive, he’s going back,’ I was sitting there, frozen in time. When he said, ‘That ball’s outta here,’ my sister was the first one to jump, then we were both jumping up and down, yelling and screaming.”

There have been times when Bubba must have felt like yelling and screaming at his dad for naming him Bubba – after former University of Tennessee quarterback Bubba Wyche, brother of former Bengals coach Sam Wyche, though technically Bubba is Trammell’s middle name, Thomas his first name.

“I tell Bubba all the time that Bubba didn’t mean stupid in 1971,” Buddy said. “It didn’t mean stupid until that movie with Tom Hanks came out.”

Forrest Gump.

Buddy, 59, is a retired high school teacher. He received a call from his brother, Rex, who had heard about Bubba’s big debut. Rex is another dumb southerner. He is a retired nuclear physicist.

“What’s the first thing you think when you hear Bubba?” Buddy asked.

Dumb southerner.

“That’s right and it shouldn’t be that way,” he said. “Why is it OK to be Tiger or Pokey or Fuzzy, but it’s not OK to be Bubba?”

It was OK to be Bubba in the eyes of those who paid to watch the Mets run their winning streak to six and expand their wild-card lead to 2 ½ games. If an election had been held yesterday, New York might even have a mayor named Bubba.